Living lives we want — and deserve

In 2007, by any definition of success, Arianna Huffington of HuffPost fame was sitting on top of the world.

Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People on the planet. She had money, stature and extraordinary power. And she had a Greek way of pronouncing truths that still make her insights about media and politics sound like they're coming straight from Delphi.

Arianna Huffington arrives on the red carpet for an afterparty for the third-season premiere of HBO series "Girls" in New York, Jan. 6, 2014.(Elizabeth D. Herman/The New York Times)

Huffington was flying high.

And then, in her Icarus phase, she took a big fall. She experienced a painful crack, and then, all the light poured in. She writes about it in shameless detail in her new book “Thrive,” which I read twice this summer and now want to give to every work-obsessed, stressed-out, overconnected and burned out person I know. There are so many of us.

On the morning of April 6, 2007, Huffington collapsed in her home office, mentally and physically exhausted. She hit the desk, cut her eye, broke her collarbone, and ended up in a pool of blood. In some circles, this is called doing a “Hillary.'

Looking back — as in the classic, life only makes sense in retrospect — Huffington tells us it was her aha moment, the start of a profound journey that finally woke her up to the out-of-control mess her life had become.

“I was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week,” Huffington writes. She was overstressed, over-connected and sleep-deprived, trying to keep up in a sterile corporate world of men in suits and women in fear.

“Was this what success looked like?” she asked herself. “Is this the life I wanted?'

That’s when Huffington realized she had to change … change her life, change her habits, and change the workplace to help others thrive, too. Most notably, she had to change her definition of success.

Our current definition is “toxic and unsustainable,” she writes. It comes from a male-dominated workplace culture that is “fueled by stress, sleep deprivation and burnout.”

In that culture, success is all about money and power and long nights at the office, and nothing about living the good life, slowing down, finding joy in the moment, wonder in the world.

“To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for,” writes Arianna, “we need a Third Metric, a third measure that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well being, wisdom, wonder and giving.”

You go, girl. Those four pillars are the backbone of her book, and increasingly, her own life. In “Thrive,” she details what her life looks like now, compared to then, when she sacrificed her well-being and forgot that the purpose of life is to be happy, and help make others happy, too.

Now Huffington makes time in her crazy busy life for meditation, deep breathing, long walks, exercise and yoga — all ways she recharges and revitalizes on a regular basis. She now calls herself a shameless “sleep evangelist,” who gets at least eight hours of sleep a night and pleads with her readers to figure out what they need .. or else.

“Cheating your body of the R & R it needs can make you more prone to illness, stress, traffic accidents and weight gain,” she writes, backing up this and dozens of other health claims with lots of studies and statistics.

Put bedtime on you schedule! Set a clock at night, not to wake up, but to remind you to go to sleep. Take naps. When we sleep more, she says, we “become more competent and in control of our lives. It gives new meaning to the old canard of women sleeping their way to the top.”

Huffington is especially concerned about women, because they pay a much higher price than men trying to compete in a workplace that works them to exhaustion.

“Women in stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease and 60 percent greater risk of diabetes,” she writes.

But there’s good news, too. Huffington sees a monumental shift happening, an awakening in the world that parallels her own transformation.

“We are entering a new era,” she predicts. “How we measure success is changing … and women are leading the way.”

Next week: More about well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving.

Marilynn Preston is a fitness expert, personal trainer and speaker on healthy lifestyle issues. She has a website, marilynnpreston.com, and welcomes reader questions, which can be sent to MyEnergyExpress@aol.com.

Marilynn Preston

Marilynn Preston is a fitness expert, personal trainer and speaker on healthy lifestyle issues. She has a website, marilynnpreston.com, and welcomes reader questions, which can be sent by email.

Last modified: August 12, 2014
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